Information technology (IT) systems provide businesses with automated processes for executing business transactions, including order entry and fulfillment, funds transfer, production control, and various other financial transactions. IT is often regarded as a strategic asset of the business, as critical to its success as any assembly line technology within a manufacturing environment. Depending on the type of industry, an enterprise can invest from 2-10% of its gross revenues to install and maintain its IT infrastructure. Increasingly, the competitive position of an enterprise depends on how effectively this investment is managed operationally, tactically, and strategically.
The IT infrastructures used by businesses are becoming increasingly complex. Made up of literally thousands of individual hardware and software components, such infrastructures include mainframe computers, servers, printers, workstations, various wide and local area networks, operating systems, middleware, applications, and databases. This technology is becoming increasingly embedded within the business processes. Indeed, with the advent of e-business, in some instances the technology itself is the business.
Traditionally, this technology has been managed by distinct operational, tactical, and strategic IT management processes. Technology is now available to automatically react to operational events within this infrastructure to adjust performance and correct some errors. The infrastructure is monitored for a set of operational events or errors, which, when detected, trigger the performance of predetermined actions. The set of monitored events has grown over time to the point where nearly fully automated operation is now possible.
An important limitation of current automated systems is that they deal exclusively with operational events, and that they are based on a set of technical criteria. Some business factors (such as time of day, day of week, or day of year when a transaction occurs) are entirely technical and thus lend themselves to monitoring. In general, operational data relating to the physical performance of the system (such as system uptime, response time and the like) may easily be collected and used to manage the system. However, a wide variety of business factors are not as easily expressed in terms of operational data. For example, a bank having several ATM machines at different locations may easily collect data regarding the number of transactions at each location. This data, however, does not distinguish the relative importance of the customers visiting a given location; accordingly, the bank does not have a clear indication of the strategic business value of ATM operations at that location.
There is a need for an improved automated IT management system in which the business value of various IT operations may be determined, in order to maximize the strategic value of the IT infrastructure.